Oct. 6, 1887: An Architect for the Machine Age

1887: Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known to the world as Le Corbusier, is born in the Swiss city of La Chaux-de-Fonds. He will change his name and take French citizenship in his 30s. More importantly, he will help pioneer the International Style of architecture and is one of the most influential proponents of the machine aesthetic.

Jeanneret-Gris’ interest in design and architecture came early in life. He attended the local art school, where he studied under architect Rene Chapallaz, who became a major influence. After moving to Paris in 1907, he toiled for Auguste Perret, an architect renowned for his work in reinforced concrete construction. A few years later he continued on to Berlin, where he became fluent in German and schooled under Peter Behrens, another architect with bohemian predilections esteemed for his industrial designs.

By the time he returned to Switzerland, where he spent the World War I years, Jeanneret-Gris’ guiding aesthetic was well formed.

In adopting the single-name pseudonym Le Corbusier, when he returned to Paris shortly after the war, Jeanneret was following a popular bohemian practice of the time. He took the name, in fact, during a brief period where he abandoned architecture for painting and sculpture. Like his artistic brethren, Le Corbusier was making a symbolic statement that anyone was capable of reinventing himself.

But his estrangement from the drafting table didn’t last long. By 1922, he was back at it, picking up where he had left off, this time in partnership with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret.

That meant continuing the theoretical development of the style that would come to define not only his own work but an entire school of architecture. If his early years were spent as a provincial architect, his aesthetic was anything but. His formative work, which included a number of private homes and villas, reflected his reverence for the machine aesthetic.

Le Corbusier admired the design of well-built automobiles and the great trans-Atlantic steamships of interbellum Europe. His attitude can be summed up by his most famous quote: “A house is a machine for living in.” (The man was born and raised in a town known for its watchmaking. How Swiss is that?)

His signature buildings, for example the Villa Savoye outside of Paris (built in the late ’20s), embody this architectural style, which he referred to generally as Purism, after the art form that was itself a rejection of Cubism. The lines are clean and sharp (in contrast to the full and curvaceous lines of Streamline Moderne, then very popular), and the interior functions are precise and laid out in a modular way. Villa Savoye is also built on reinforced concrete stilts, another Le Corbusier trademark and one of his “five points of architecture.”

But Le Corbusier didn’t limit himself to the design of single structures. He’s also remembered for his theories on urban planning and renewal, which, again, reflected his rejection of traditional models. Never one to make modest proposals, Le Corbusier tried to interest Parisian officials in bulldozing the Marais and replacing the district with a forest of egalitarian skyscrapers surrounded by tracts of open space. For Le Corbusier, this radical plan represented a complete break with the past, something he continually advocated as necessary for society to advance.

Fortunately for Paris, if not the betterment of society, his idea was rejected.

Frustrated in his dream of becoming the latter-day Baron Haussmann, Le Corbusier looked elsewhere for opportunities to implement his Radiant City urban plan. Eventually, a number of these unités were built around Europe, the first (and most famous) of these in Marseilles. If they bear more than a passing resemblance to Soviet-style architecture, it’s worth noting that Le Corbusier was influenced by his study of an earlier communal project, the Narkomfin Building in Moscow.

Like a lot of so-called visionaries, Le Corbusier was an active self-promoter. He authored numerous books on architecture and design and openly courted protégés. Like modern-day Apple devotees slobbering at the feet of Steve Jobs, Le Corbusier’s acolytes worshiped him with blind, near-religious fervor.

His critics, however, were less sanguine. The harshest of them argued that his urban designs, especially, were cold and sterile, and worse, the product of technical incompetence.

Nevertheless, by the time he died in 1965, Le Corbusier’s enormous influence on 20th-century architectural sensibilities was indisputable. He ranks in a select pantheon alongside such worthies as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The concrete monastery is appropriately severe, though still redolent of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye three decades earlier. This design was a precursor to concrete work by others around the world in a style dubbed the New Brutalism.

The famous and influential apartment block prominently displays the deep “sun breaks” Le Corbusier prescribed for all his Mediterranean and tropical buildings. The slender pilotis cylindrical support columns of the 1920s and 1930s have become robust and sculptural.